The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the … - Edward St Aubyn

Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village.

As he laboured up to his bedsit, a miniature roof conversion with sloping walls on the fifth floor of a narrow Victorian building in Kensington, Patrick seemed to regress through evolutionary history, growing more stooped with each flight, until he was resting his knuckles on the carpet of the top landing, like an early hominid that has not yet learned to stand upright on the grasslands of Africa and only makes rare and nervous expeditions down from the safety of the trees.

The tragedy of old age, when a man’s too weak to hit his own child.